Thursday, January 30, 2014

I see that Google+ recently announced topic-based browsing. This is a good thing, but it only partially fixes half of the problem.

Google+ should allow posting authors to tag their posting with one or more topics. Furthermore, topic posters should be able to publish a small topic tree of the topics to which they post. Followers should then be allowed to view this tree and subscribe to different topics (channels) or branches. This way, followers who want to see photo posts but not programming posts would only see photo posts. The net result is that followers would have a higher density of interesting posts in their Home streams, and posters would not lose followers by posting content uninteresting to many of their followers.

With Google's NLP and Machine Learning talent, I would think that poster topic category trees could be computed from their historical posts, and that from View and +1 statistics, topics of interest to users/followers could also be computed (recommended to be precise). So, having people explicitly stating their postings' topics and followers the topics in which they are interested may very well be unnecessary.

Below are some half-baked preliminary ideas I posted in 2011. If topic trees and follower subscription to tree nodes were implemented, I'm not sure Circles would offer any benefits. And, the diagram below would be much simpler if the center Circles tree was eliminated.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Okay, it has been about 36 hours since I posted the previous Google+ photo posting statistics spreadsheet so I thought I'd go and take a look at how many views the spreadsheet posting has received.

Well, it turns out it has been viewed 11,679 times! This raises many interesting questions about the inner workings of Google+. Here is a screenshot of a snapshot of the view statistics (click on the image for full 1:1 resolution):

By comparison, one of my more popular photo postings receives only about 1,000 views over longer periods. Since a large fraction of my followers probably added me because of my landscape photography postings, this makes the spreadsheet views statistic quite surprising. I wish I had access to the attributes of the people who viewed this posting, ideally broken down by company and photography fan vs. techie.

Monday, January 27, 2014

I added a photo to my profile
and several Google+ Communities last night at 8:13 pm. The attached
image shows a screenshot of the associated statistics after a 12-hour
overnight period. I haven't yet decided how I want to visualize this
information... I'm certainly too busy to spend additional time on this
exercise this week:)

The Java unit test draws an overlay semi-transparent graphic which visualizes which widget is activated for each pixel in a mockup e-mail app.

Summary

• Desktop pointing devices (mice) have precise, single-pixel accuracy - touch devices do not• Depending on device attributes, touch users are lucky to achieve an accuracy of 10-30+ pixels• This causes many occurrences of: User intends to activate widget A but inadvertently activates nearby widget B• The reason this problem exists is because touch device and OS OEMs assume that the legacy desktop single-pixel precision model will work well on touch devices - this is a poor assumption• My recent experiment suggests that the frequency of inadvertent widget activations (event-to-unintended-widget mapping) can be improved• The above URL slide deck summarizes a project I did over this past weekend to demonstrate that, for one simple UI at least, an algorithm for mapping touchevent (x,y) points to widgets which considers touchpoint-to-widget centroid distances as well as which widget's bounding rectangle contains the touchpoint (x,y) can provide the user with a parameterizable/tunable margin of error border around widgets which has the potential to substantially reduce the activation of unintended widgets• I might add that inadvertently activating an unintended widget can be dangerous if the unintended widget were to, for example, open a malicious URL or e-mail• More work is needed to evaluate and refine the proposed method in a variety of UI contexts, but I believe the presented algorithm has meritSo, extremely weary of using touch device UIs which frequently activate the wrong widget, I spent some time this weekend developing and validating (on one simple UI) the above simple algorithm which offers imho a better approach to map touch event (x,y) coordinates to UI widgets.Below is a screenshot from this mini project I did over the weekend showing a semi-transparent overlay encoding, via color, to which widget a touch event at each pixel would be mapped were the current naive Widget.rect.contains( Point pt ) logic to be replaced with a simple algorithm based on touch point distance to widget centroids + which widget's bounding rectangle contains the touch point (x,y).Original Google+ post on this topic Below is a screenshot from the unit test touch-widget event mapping code:

As can be seen in the above screenshot, touch points anywhere within the semi-transparent red circle for the top checkbox would be routed to that checkbox. This provides users with a margin of error which should reduce the frequency of having the wrong/unintended widget receive the touch event. Note that the left and right overlays pertain to two different centroids for the checkboxes: Left: centroid is for checkbox alone, Right: centroid is for table cell which contains the checkbox widget.Comments are welcome, either below or via email: 2to32minus1@gmail.com

About Me

I have worn software engineer/architect, entrepreneur, software manager, product manager, and principal investigator hats in multiple, diverse fields, including many key startup roles. I enjoy and excel at entering/innovating in new domains. Currently based in Northern California.

Disclaimer:Any comments, ideas, Intellectual Property, or opinions I place on
the Web are entirely my own and are completely distinct from, do not
reflect upon, or represent in any way, my employers - past, present, and
future.